Letter: Stand Your Ground laws foster mistrust

Comment

The State Journal-Register

Writer

Posted Mar. 7, 2014 at 1:04 AM

Posted Mar. 7, 2014 at 1:04 AM

I support E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, who recently called for the repeal of “Stand Your Ground” laws. His commentary, printed Feb. 21, was prompted by the verdicts reached in the high profile-murder trial of Michael Dunn.

In November 2012, Dunn shot and killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis in a Jacksonville, Fla., gas station parking lot after complaining to the teen (and three other occupants in the vehicle) to turn down their loud “thug music.” Dunn argued that he saw a shotgun in the car, but no weapon was found.

Though Dunn was found guilty of three counts of attempted second-degree murder and one count of discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle, the jury deadlocked over the first-degree murder charge.

The irony here is that the jury’s decision means Dunn will be imprisoned for many years for attempting to kill three individuals, yet that same jury could not reach consensus on the first-degree murder charge over Dunn’s murder of Davis. If Davis had been alone in his car that fateful evening, Dunn (like George Zimmerman) could now be a free man pending whether prosecutors would have tried him again. That’s a scary thought.

Florida’s SYG law provides a convenient loophole for a person to use force if he/she “reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself/herself or another against the other’s imminent use of unlawful force.” Dionne’s stated central premise is that statutes are “supposed to solve problems, not create them.” Moreover, he properly contends that, “Laws should provide for as much clarity as possible, not expand the realms of ambiguity and subjectivity.”

Perhaps most significantly, Dionne underscores the importance of laws helping the American citizenry “live together more harmoniously” versus failed SYG statutes that sow “mistrust across racial lines.”